I don't understand why this is set up the way it is. Maintaining a BitTorrent tracker for models seems like a reasonably good idea, but you have to "apply to join" to be able to contribute?
Just do it like how libgen does. Maybe publish a RSS torrent feed people can subscribe to for the newer publications - knowing someone is curating the feed.
Weird to have open licensed stuff on private tracker.
I can definitely picture a piece of content that's been scrubbed from everywhere except old copies of LLMs in which it still exists in a lossy form, with people trying to extract it from those old copies with the help of newer models. Private trackers have thrived for decades and will continue to do so because they allow a community to foster around a shared purpose (pardon the pun).
Although that being said, i doubt i would go through the trouble of signing up just for this purpose, personally.
I see the merit in keeping a decentralized archive for open models. But there has to be a better way to do it vs keeping it behind auth and an application form.
it's light, not like usual trackers, it's only to make sure people seed 1:1 and to reduce load on a couple of people seeding large models to everyone. the only way to do that is to enforce it, and for that you need a place where you can possibly enforce it without making it platform run, so, that's why you have this.
To what end?
Weird to have open licensed stuff on private tracker.
Although that being said, i doubt i would go through the trouble of signing up just for this purpose, personally.
Yes. So it seems to me that the purpose of the project is to maintain a common good, but then I don't see how keeping it private achieves that.